In recent years, various user interfaces that use recognition techniques such as a speech recognition technique, text recognition technique, and the like have been proposed. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-160289 has proposed a user interface which allows the user to easily correct recognition results, which cannot be determined by a speech recognition apparatus, in correspondence with input speech. With this user interface, the user can easily correct recognition results that cannot be recognized.
Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 63-48040 has proposed a user interface which records input speech and plays it back for a partner user to make him or her confirm in a private branch exchange which recognizes the callee's name uttered by a caller. In this way, even when a wrong recognition result is obtained, the partner user can recognize it by hearing the playback tone. Hence, when the partner user notices a wrong recognition result, he or she can correct it by himself or herself.
However, with both the prior arts, when an error has occurred during a recognition process, or when a wrong recognition result is obtained, the user himself or herself must correct it, resulting in poor convenience. Even when a recognition result is correct, if an error has occurred upon executing a post-process (e.g., a translation process) using the recognition result, the user himself or herself must correct it.
On the other hand, it is difficult to register all words and phrases including proper nouns in a grammar and standard patterns for recognition, and improvement of the recognition rate has its limits. For this reason, when an error has occurred during a recognition process or a post-process using the recognition result, it is desired to save labor required for user's correction as much as possible.